


juvenescence

by doydle



Category: Free!
Genre: Fluff and Angst, Gen, Kid Fic, Not actually incest, Sibling Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-11-11
Updated: 2013-11-22
Packaged: 2018-01-01 05:09:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1040714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doydle/pseuds/doydle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU where Gou comes to live with Rin's family shortly after Rin's dad dies. A collection of drabbles about the Matsuoka siblings growing up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

 

Rin Matsuoka only remembers 3 things from when he was 6 years old.

He remembers being horribly upset that he couldn’t go to the summer festival. There were to be a million things to see and eat and do, the harbour transformed overnight into a magic wonderland lit up by lights and chatter. All of his friends had been given allowances and full leave to explore, and he alone was rudely told he couldn’t go. His mom’s explanation, long and full of adult phrases, felt like an insult to his 6 years of experience in life. He was angry that he could not go and angry that he could not understand and angry that once again, he had been proven inadequate compared to everyone else. He spent the day of the summer festival sulking and watching reruns of Atomic-Man, taking every opportunity to glare at his parents. When his friends came back the next day with tales of rescued goldfish and elaborate masks, he didn’t speak to his parents for a whole 2 days.

He remembers the typhoon. He remembers that by the end of it, he had no dad or grandfather.

The funeral was numbing. Adult after adult he had never seen before got up and paid their respects, a long procession of ghosts mourning the newly dead. The only thing that seemed alive at all was a girl who could not stop bawling. Some relative had explained that the disgrace was his sister, one year younger than him, named Gou, lived with his grandfather before he passed and now such and such arrangements would have to be made with this or that relative. It was all white noise—he’d never seen his grandfather and he remembered his sister only vaguely.

He remembers staring at the coffin and desperately hoping that perhaps his dad was still alive. Perhaps he was exploring some deserted island or riding dolphins into the sunset, perhaps he was fighting to get back home even now. There was no body, he had heard his uncle say. There was no body. Clutching onto that last waning hope, he had not even bothered to cry.

Months later, terrified he was forgetting his father’s voice, he remembers turning the house upside down for his dad’s old belongings. He was not allowed in his father’s room and there was no comfort to be found in his old fishing gear, so he clenched his fists and braved the spiders in the attic to look for memories. The photo albums had been wedged beneath a mountain of old DVDs and forms, but he had got them out in the end. To his endless disappointment, none of the photos were of him and his dad. He was near tears when his mom discovered him upstairs, and upon seeing the scattered mess in the attic, smiled for the first time in 3 months.

“Rin, you’ve found your father’s photos from his swim team days!”

She took the photo album downstairs and did not even scold him a little bit about the mess he made in the attic. They settled down together on the comfy sofa downstairs and made a day of the photo album. His mom knew all the stories.

“He wanted to become an Olympic swimmer, Rin,” she told him with an air of delighted secrecy, pointing to a picture of his Dad and his friends clutching a golden trophy and beaming.

The next day, Rin signed up for swimming classes.

* * *

 

Gou Matsuoka remembers only a blurry mess from when she was 6 years old.

After her grandfather dies, Gou spends weeks bouncing from place to place, relative to relative. All of them say that they love her but none of them can seem to afford to keep her or stand her crying after the first week, so Gou switches families over and over. Gou hates it, but she can’t imagine it any other way. She doesn’t want anyone replacing Grandpa, but without someone to fill the gaps, she’s without anchor. She desperately wants someone to love, someone to love her back. So Gou cries a lot.

When Aunty Naoki tells her that she’s going to go live with Aunty Yasuhiko near the beach, Gou thinks that her tears might overflow the Pacific Ocean and flood all of Japan. Leaving another family is upsetting enough, but living near the sea is terrifying. The sea is a cold ancient monster, gargantuan and heaving, one so dangerous it swallowed her grandfather whole. Despite this, she manages to keep herself to snuffles on the car ride there until Aunty Naoki tells her to enjoy the sunset on the ocean out the window. Then she bawls.

She tires herself out and arrives at Aunty Yasuhiko’s house tear streaked, drooling, and unconscious.

Halfway through the night, she wakes in a strange room. Someone has changed her into pajamas and tucked her in with thick soft blankets on a flowery futon. The room is small and plain, with a desk and a closet, her forlorn little pink suitcase lying at the foot of her bed, toppled over and cracked open. The wind howled against the window pane, and the salty smell of the sea air is everywhere. She briefly panics—then realises where she is—then panics again.

It takes her a while to calm down and she thinks she is going to cry again, so she pulls up the covers and tries to be as quiet as possible and not get any tears on the sheets, which look new and smell nice. Halfway through her third hiccup the blanket is rudely yanked back.

“Hey!”

There is a boy kneeling by her bed, with red hair and redder eyes. He looks to be about her age, but his pajamas look like they were made for someone much older, and the oversized black material hangs loosely from his wiry frame and pools at his midriff. Her blanket fisted in his hands, and he looks thoroughly annoyed.

“You’re so loud,” he grumbles, and starts to fumble in his pockets, searching for something.

Gou’s eyes widen, too offended to be shocked. “I wasn’t being _loud_ , I had the blanket covering me before you—hey!” Gou is thumped over the head with a package of tissues for her trouble.

“Crying’s loud wherever you do it. That’s the whole point.” he says as Gou clutches the package of tissues, flabbergasted. “Now shush. I have swim practice in the morning.”

And with that, the boy tucked himself in next to Gou, jostling her over to make room on the futon.

They fell asleep the way only children can.


	2. Chapter 2

Rin Matsuoka is a swimmer, an Olympic athlete-in-training.

He says so to Gou one ridiculously early morning, garbling out the words through enthusiastic mouthfuls of miso soup. Gou sends him a tired glare by way of answer and tries not to fall headfirst into her own bowl. She’s still not used to the grueling rules that Rin has imposed upon himself and by extension, everyone at the Matsuoka house: wake up at 5:00, go for a morning run, go to school, go to swim practice, go for an evening run, go home, eat, go do homework, sleep, rinse and repeat. Gou doesn’t much like it, but she doesn’t have much of a choice. Rin is insistent and loud, and he’s going for the perfect attendance award at his swim school.

Gou learns to structure her life around Rin and his swimming. She adapts to waking at ungodly hours of the morning, the athlete’s diet of protein and carbohydrate slush, and above all, following Rin around all the time. Swim practice is after school Monday, Thursday, Wednesday, and Saturday, which means that Rin peels out for the public pool immediately after school, Gou a mere afterthought in tow.

Technically, Gou is part of the swim class too, but she’s never set foot in the public pool. The first time she’s brought to class, decked out in her very own new swimsuit, she freezes up on the edge of the pool. She’s breathing in the smell of it, anti-septic and filthy all at once, and she’s trying to search out a friendly voice in the loud noises echoing and surround her and she hates the humidity and she won’t think about Grandpa, she won’t—all at once she’s turned tail and fled. Aunty Naoki searches for an half an hour before she finds her, shivering and still in her swimsuit behind a bush in the parking lot.

So while Rin goes to swim class, she sits on the bench beside the pool and does homework. She stays until Aunty comes to pick them up and bring them home. Aunty Naoki never asks about her attendance.

Improbably, she learns to swim anyways.

It’s a Thursday, and the half the swim class is being instructed in the butterfly stroke, swimming back and forth at the deep end while the other half is sitting at the shallow end, supposedly doing drills. Really, the half at the shallow end are just taking a break and talking with one another. Three of the boys are having a water fight and she shoots one of them a dirty look when they splash dangerously close to her math homework. She regrets it instantly. The boy she’s looking at holds her gaze and she can feel him sizing her up as he lifts himself effortlessly out of the pool. He straightens, and Gou realizes for the first time that he’s perhaps a year or two older than her and definitely stronger, with triceps more even defined than her brother’s. The two others follow, and she knows she’s in trouble.

“Why don’t you ever swim?” he says, but it’s not a question, it’s a challenge. The boy’s frame looms over her, a dragon-like gleam in his golden eyes.

“Why is it any of your business?” she shoots back, but it’s too rushed and she knows from the smirk growing on his lips that he heard the way her voice wavered at the end. Her cheeks feel hot.

“If you’re in swim class,” he drawls, “you should swim.”

Faster than she can blink, his hand closes in a painful vice around her bicep. She’s yanked to her feet, her papers spilling all over the floor. He swivels, pulling her towards the pool, and at last moment, he lets go. She shrieks in terror, arms clutching for purchase, for balance, but it’s too late and—

The water is _cold_ , like needles of ice digging in under her skin. Gou gasps on reflex and the needles drive home into her lungs, into her nose. It’s painful, and a sharp sense of terror kicks in as she realises she is sinking farther and farther away from the surface, farther away from life.

Gou Matsuoka realizes she is drowning.

She’s screaming and thrashing about wildly in the water, but there is no sound and her movements are sluggish at best. She is going to die, she is going to die the same way Grandpa died—

Something closes around her waist, and in her terror she claws at it, but it holds firm and starts to pull her up. A second, two seconds, then her head breaks the surface of the water and finally her screaming is sounding, even if the sound is little more than a guttural croak.

And Gou is shocked to realize that the name she is shouting isn’t that of her Grandpa, but her brother.

The same brother who’s clutching her, Rin Matsuoka, steady as a rock. The same brother who’s saved her, whose hands bear the scratches of panicked animal fingers. She keeps repeating his name in between coughs, arms wrapped around his shoulder as Rin brings them over to the side of the pool. He sets her on the edge, back on solid ground.

The lifeguard, a rickety college kid, is gawking at them a few steps behind them, unsure how to approach the siblings. Finally his indecision gives way to blustering responsibility and he moves between them. “Alright, uh, is she breathing?”

“Shut up,” hisses Rin, all venom and black anger. “Shut up and go get a towel, for Christ’s sake.”


End file.
